Tuesday, August 23, 2016

‘Reely and Truly’ is a new documentary from director Tyrone Lebon, the director for Frank Ocean's latest video release "NIKES". This 30-minute film is a visual poem on contemporary photographers and their practices.

Lebon’s intention is for the film to be a photographic object in itself. It is shot on all available celluloid formats (including 65mm, 35mm, super 16mm, 16mm, and super 8mm). The film has a free structure with an unconventional narrative, taking on the form of a visual poem.

This film is part of the ongoing ‘Reely and Truly’ project which will culminate in a book of photographs, texts and films about the practice of over 30 contemporary photographers to be published by DoBeDo in 2015. This 30 minute film is an extended trailer for that project.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

"After making a careful study of contemporary fashion plates, Baudelaire came to the conclusion that one couldn’t examine clothes apart from the individual wearing them. “You might as well admire the tattered rags hung up as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomeu,” he wrote in his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics.” In order to “recover the light and movement of life,” clothes needed to be animated by a living body, and it was only on this living body that they were to be understood. One wonders what he would’ve made of the nascent trend of the fashion exhibition, in which the fashions of yesteryear appear on mannequins, those motionless abstractions of the human figure.

“La Mode retrouvée,” now at the Musée de la Mode in Paris, and coming in September to New York, uses clothes as a sort of Pompeiian ash in order to sketch the person who once filled them out. In this case, it’s the Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe (1860–1952), who was by reputation the most fashionable woman of her time. At her salon on the Rue d’Astorg, an integral part of the political and artistic milieux, she arranged for what was thought to be the impossible Russian-Franco alliance, as well as the reception of Fauré, Wagner, Isadora Duncan, and the Ballets Russes in Paris. Historians of the era have argued that no patron did more for music than she. And this at a time when, no matter the fact that she was married into wealth and rank, she had neither rights nor property as her own, as was the case for all women under the civil code of the Third Republic."

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Director, Edward Yang, who was one of the leading film-makers of the Taiwanese new wave cinema. His film "The Terrorizers", which drew inspiration from Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up", challenges traditional culture and the way it's portrayed in film, abandoning conventional narrative structures where the story progresses at a pace that echoes real life.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

I first discovered the homemade films by Anger while living around the corner from the Westerfeld House in San Francisco, where he shot some of them (Invocation features Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, and music by Mick Jagger).

Aside from being arguably the most beautiful house in San Francisco, the house has a fascinating history. It's been occupied by Czarist Russians (known for awhile as the "Russian Embassy"), jazz musicians like John Handy, a theatre collective, and was eventually owned by Anger, who held Satanic rituals and kept pet tigers there — the tower used to have a pentagram on the floor, and there are claw marks from the cats on the walls to this day. The Grateful Dead and Charles Manson were frequent visitors.

Now the home is owned by a charming Victorian structure restorer who has lovingly rehabilitated it. It will be featured in a documentary, House of Legends, debuting this fall.

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Reading.What is your most marked characteristic? Getting a word in edgewise.What do you consider your greatest achievement? Discovering morning.What is your greatest fear? Converting kilometers to miles.Which historical figure do you most identify with? Santa Claus.Which living person do you most admire? Elvis.Who are your heroes in real life? The consumer.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? While in New York, tolerance. Outside of New York, intolerance.What is the trait you most deplore in others? Talent.What is your favorite journey? The road of artistic excess.What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Sympathy and originality.Which words or phrases do you most overuse? Chthonic, miasma.What is your greatest regret? That I never wore bell-bottoms.What is your current state of mind? Pregnant.If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? My fear of them (wife and son excluded).What is your most treasured possession? A photograph held together by cellophane tape of Little Richard that I bought in 1958, and a pressed and dried chrysanthemum picked on my honeymoon in Kyoto.What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Living in fear.Where would you like to live? Northeast Bali or south Java.What is your favorite occupation? Squishing paint about a senseless canvas.hat is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to return books.What is the quality you most like in a woman? The ability to burp on command.What are your favorite names? Sears & Roebuck.What is your motto? “What” is my motto.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Voyager 1 Golden RecordThis record came up twice for me in the last week.... Some might consider that coincidence, others may consider it a mystical sign. In any case, we create beautiful things on this earth and this record is a reminder of that. The selection of music for the record was completed by a team composed of Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, artist Jon Lomberg, and Timothy Ferris, who was an editor for Rolling Stone at the time. Read more here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record